ServiceWatch and / or Discovery?

[Scheuerman1]

Good morning,

We are currently looking at possibly using ServiceWatch and / or Discovery in our environment. Has anyone had any experience with either of these modules? Below I have outlined what we hope to accomplish with each to give you some background.

• ServiceWatch - We have a change control policy in place but we hope to have active monitoring for any changes in the environment with ServiceWatch. In addition we would like it to feed into the central CMDB we are building out to more effectively manage the enterprise.

• Discovery - We have many disparate tools to monitoring but none of them feed into a central location. We have no easy or quick method to pull reports or even functionally look across the enterprise. These are some of the challenges we hope to overcome with Discovery.

Now with the above information in mind. What are your thoughts? Experiences with these modules?

Thanks for your time and feedback!

[saadit · Accepted solution]

Hi Brandon,

Firstly, ServiceWatch and Discovery operate very differently and individually provide HUGE benefits to your organization; but the real benefits come when you pair the two. We're currently implementing both Discovery and ServiceWatch at our company and just about to go live with our first release. I'll provide you my thoughts on both and hopefully it'll provide you some insight.

ServiceWatch:

ServiceWatch performs top down discovery of business services. In very simple terms, you give ServiceWatch an entry point (how users access the application/business service), which in most cases is an URL, and ServiceWatch maps out the application top down (from the entry point down to the db / storage layer). Once an application is mapped out you can integrate servicewatch with any of the supported monitoring connectors and you'll have a living, "service aware" map of your application. As for your change control policy, ServiceWatch can definitely notify you of any unplanned changes to devices captured in the business services maps that are active. See below screenshot of an active business service we have in our ServiceWatch instance.

ServiceWatch does not have a CMDB component on its own. Currently, ServiceWatch integrates with ServiceNow (Fuji) and any active business services are pushed through to ServiceNow and serviceWatch CI information can be viewed in ServiceNow. However, in the ServiceNow Geneva release (either this month or next) ServiceWatch will be integrated on to the ServiceNow platform and CI's discovered in ServiceWatch will populate in the ServiceNow CMDB out of the box.

Discovery:

Your use case for discovery is the same reason why we looked into ServiceNow in the first place. Discovery / CMDB is definitely your answer to getting rid of the disparate / inconsistent keeping of data in excel files, sharepoint sites, etc. With discovery, you basically "boil the ocean" in terms of scanning your entire network and pulling back all information possible from desktop/laptops (pc and macs), servers (physical and virtual), databases, storage arrays, network devices, etc. in your network. You'll have a single source of truth for all devices across your company.

My thoughts:

In a nutshell, both products are great and serve different purposes (with some overlap). ServiceNow will get rid of your need to maintain visio diagrams of your hosted business services/applications and Discovery/CMDB will consolidate all the devices on your network and serve as a consolidated repository for those devices. The real power comes when you combine the two products and make your CMDB serviceaware. This is especially helpful in support scenarios when one or more hosts are impacted - with the two products combined you can lookup all the information about a specific host and what's running on it (in CMDB) and then quickly assess the upstream and downstream impacts (in ServiceWatch).

I hope this information helps. If you need more information on either of the two please feel free to respond back /message me directly and I'd be more than happy to help.